[326] Screed City

May 16, 2025

[326]

05/15/2025 Thursday. Box on box on kitchen island. The Chalet. Lower Granville, Vermont.

Back in the land of milk and honey, that is, if milk was mud and honey was more mud and rain and inertia. I kid. Really I do. Like my friend Gandalf used to tell my friend Jack, “Stop being so negative, man.” Its not that I am negative, or being negative, its just that Vom has a way of making you walk around defending your perspective within your own head for hours justifying your feelings of negativity. I don’t know, maybe anyone remembers when Screed City started, back when Junior Mint first made the scene and I was killing all those mice and the boiler at Beaver Haus was bunk and Professor Curly was down in the City working on her Broadway play and things were kind of okay, but The Pandemic was raging and I was constantly trying to cost/benefit how I should take care of the car and how much money I should spend on tires and brakes and et cetera. Back when I was so young that I could get worked up about anything and in order to deal with these emotions I started a newsletter about it that has since secured my place in Hancock history and made me hundreds of bucks. You know, what the bridesmaids call the halcyon days. What great days those were. The Goatman, Dog Boy Beach, Dosa the Moses of goats, Vinny Junior. Remember when the goats got loose and ate the screens on the windows? Tried their hardest to get run over on the highway? Remember?

I don’t know what my point is. I am not reminiscing. I suppose I was trying to segue to now and how the more things change the more they stay the exact same as the bridesmaids will remind you, but that is not my point either. I don’t know what my point is. I suppose I just wanted to write something fun and mildly amusing but…And then suddenly I remember that me and Scott went to Vancouver the other day, in British Columbia and I hate to say it, not because I am such a negative Ned, but because it is the anomaly that proves the rule, I had a fantastic time. Like an honest to goodness, good time. Like when the day was over I thought to myself, “That was a fun day.” I even told Scott it was a fun day. I even told him to tell our coworker who showed us around town, who lives there, that I had a very fun day. It was astonishing how fun the day was. It was a fun day. The kind of day you give your dog before you put it down. The day was fun.

The anomaly. Here’s the thing, work is for working and getting paid to work. “Work is not fun, that is why they call it work.” James Oseland author of Jimmy Neurosis. He’s not wrong. I don’t disagree with him. Work is a four letter word. But occasionally work actually is fun. Once, every say, twenty years? Like truly fun. Like spending the day in Vancouver, BC doing the Vancouver Maneuver. But work is a slog and there is a reason for it, and that reason is; because its work. Do what you love, the bridesmaids say, and you will never work a day in your life. What I love is not working, so riddle me that, Batman. I guess I missed my calling as a fucking hobo, you jackass. Sorry, I just hate that bullshit so much. Its well intentioned but bad advice as Brock would say, and Brock, everyone knows, got arrested at the border in Canada because he could not respect personal boundaries. Those boundaries, of course, being rape. But because we live in the best of all timelines, the best of all possible worlds, rape is just a frame of mind. A vibe. Work is just a frame of mind. A vibe. What is work? How fucking profound! Yeah! What is work? Whoa, you just blew my mind. No, like James says, they call it work for a reason. And James did something he loved for quite a few years and it wasn’t a fucking back rub that he received from it, what I remember him telling me was that it nearly killed him. From what I remember his reaction to it was, he basically had PTSD from it. And maybe that is it? Like having a good day in Vancouver, a good day at work should be something that makes every single other 11,392 days of work you have done so far into clear and microscopic perspective. I did one day of work and it was so fantastic it was worth it!

I am just trying to make the point that I had one fun day of work, just once that it makes me feel guilty because I am going to invoice for it. It doesn’t matter that we got kicked off the ship at nine in the morning and had to fuck around for twelve hours before we had to head to the airport where we flew overnight to Chicago and then Burlington and then had to drive for an hour and I was so exhausted and jet lagged that I couldn’t eat for twenty four hours. But I had fun! Surely that means I am doing what I love.

Therefore; fuck capitalism, abolish turnstiles, free Palestine.

Vancouver is a great city. It has it all, the city part, the skiing/mountains part, the Hollywood of the north part, the Canada part. It’s a little White and they have rollerblade lanes on the streets and hockey on the televisions at all times, but the people are good faith and nice and the USD is 100/70 at the moment.

Scott and I got off the boat and went straight to the parking garage. F, our coworker met us there with her ponytailed husband that was a blast from the past. There is an ilk in our line of work. It has taken me decades to appreciate it, but it is there. Good, hardworking weirdoes who have very specific ideas about life and how to do things, but it is all pragmatic and practical. My problem with this work and this process is that I am deep down, at a very fundamental and unchanging level, an artist, specifically a writer who has visual art and philosophical art proclivities, for thirty years I have been surrounded by people who carry multi-tools. A very fantastic thing to carry, and a thing that I have owned on many occasion and have lost on just as many occasion. My desire to fix things made out of hard material, like wood or metal or plastic, does not exist. That nonsense bootstrap quote about doing what you love for a living does a great big swerve on me when I have always done what I had to do for a living and construction pays the most when all you have is a GED and all you want to do is fiction novels about how fucked up it is to live in a world where being exploited is a national pride, where “Get back to work!” is the mantra, and unless you can afford to starve, your viewpoint is invalid. I mean, I can fix that, sure, but should I? I am the kind of worker that would prefer to let it stay broken. I pay rent for a reason. I work hourly for a reason. In a way it is a protest. And oddly, not that it really matters, but oddly, my protest can not be automated. Someone that other day told me I was lucky because my job wouldn’t go away. To which I responded, “Yeah, fuck you, you all are going to get universal income and I’ll still have to go to work.” And the guy was like, “Yeah, but you will be a millionaire because your services will be in such high demand.” And all I could say was nothing. Nothing, because that is not true. Already and for decades my services are this supposed thing that can’t be automated and in high demand. I make more money today than I have ever made, surely, but no matter what I do, there is no safety net for me. All the money I can save can’t go anywhere because the second the economy turns, and it will turn, I will have to rely on those savings. There is no safety net for the working class. In the future, when that universal basic income is necessary, the douchebags of the world that supposedly know how to navigate the economy will do a reverse means testing the weaponized ignorance gold bricking that I do now, will become a thing where I will be then be forced to work just because I know things. And everyone I know will be sending emails for a living and I will still be running a god damned chop saw because I know how to use a fucking tape measure.

I love the people I work with, but I think being a MacGyver [did you know that MacGyver’s opening theme was filmed in Vancouver, BC?] at all times does more harm to our cause that it does any good. I do not carry a multi-tool. Unless I one day have a house that I own, I will never carry a multi-tool. I have a bag of tools, when you need me to work, I will bring my bag of tools. If you want me to fix something, pay me.

We went to a park, Scott and F and I, after breakfast. F’s husband had to go to work and our big boss, who happened to be in town had some work to do too. By this point though, it was late morning, I was not at that moment having a great day. It was nice to be in Vancouver. I hadn’t been there since 2000 I think. When me and Mike drove up to Alaska via the AL-CAN highway. I was glad to look around and see how it had changed. Back then they were doing quite a bit of skyline work. The city was a construction zone, but in a very futuristic way. High rise cranes hundreds of stories up and mountains in the distance. We were coming from Seattle and the trip was going to take multiple days, so we didn’t linger, but I remember loving the look of the city. It is in a bay. The weather is mild most of the year and snowy in the winter. It really is kind of the best of all worlds. That is, if you want to both be outside, be in a city and want to make money and want to see pretty things.

After the park we drove up the mountain and rode a gondola to see some grizzly bears. It was very expensive but worth it. This is the moment the day turned from just hanging out with our luggage in downtown Vancouver, waiting until dusk to go to the airport, to having a fabulous day.

There was a park ranger that gave a thirty minute speech about the bears that I wish I would have recorded. Did you know that grizzly bears eat a bunch of bark in the winter to plug their butts so they don’t shit everywhere when they hibernate? Did you know they don’t actually hibernate? That they get up and move around once a day for many hours? I know this now. And I suppose you do too, if you believe me. Do your own research if you have to.

After the bears we went to the gift shop and I bought a fridge magnet. After that we took the took the gondola down. Or maybe we took the gondola down and then went to the gift shop. There were many gift shops. After that we drove back downtown to meet Greg, the dancer, at the fanciest hotel in town. He was drinking whiskey with large ice cubes when we got there. We had a couple drinks. He talked about his mother. How she used the phrase, “We’re hooped!” which means that we are getting fucked in the ass. A very clever and cute way to say such a thing. After that we drove to a place called HollyNorth that sold some items were were looking for. It was like the store that Peewee from Big Adventure goes into. It had all the things a movie crew would need for making movies. After that we drove over to a shop in the sub-burbs near where Greg and F lived. We saw what they were up to and Greg got in trouble for taking pictures he shouldn’t have. After that we went to the one authentic Mexican restaurant in all of Vancouver’s sub-burbs where we luckily were given a picnic table without having reservations. The food was good and the margaritas were tasty. We then drove to Greg’s house and took pictures on his lawn. After that we drove to the airport, leaving Greg behind. F was exhausted when she dropped us off. It had been twelve hours of fun. Too much fun for a Canadian! She bid us farewell and soon we were through passport control and security and drinking a beer at a wine bar with strangely suspect and angry servers while our plane was delayed by an hour.

It was a fun day. Here are some pictures of that fun day:

[Insert Vancouver photos plus a Vom one from today]